Book ‘A Mountain and a People’

Description

LebanonPostcard presents the book ‘A Mountain and a People’ – The Rural Life of Mount Lebanon – Portrayed in Postcards 1898 – 1930 by Patricia Acra Raad. Hardcopy – 33×25.5×2.5 cm – 255 pages – 2.1 kgs.

Despite its narrow dimensions, Lebanon has too many particularities, too much life and too many colors for us to disdain it. It is a world on a small scale, yet, it is a complete one and it is worth admiration for being so. As soon as one approaches the Mountain, one senses the same amazement that had already been felt by Volney at the sight of a land that is situated in the heart of Turkey, but is so different from the rest of the Ottoman Empire.”
Gabriel Charmes 1880

Extract of the Foreword

The memory of a nation is what resists the wear and tear of time, the loss of customs, the fading of values and the insidious infiltration of models from the outside.
Approximately 100 years after their publication, the first postcards representing Mount Lebanon – those small rectangular pieces of cardboard, either black, blackish-brown or colored, featuring places and attentive to people, that one happily receives but quickly forgets – have come to symbolize the resurgences of a past world and the evidence of a bygone age. For those who look at them, these postcards evoke many memories and reflect history. Collecting these images was a source of knowledge and emotions: for these sceneries and portraits, isles in the steam of time, decorate the memory like fragments of paintings, like hearts carved on a tree.
Being the witnesses of the art of living, the architecture, the social customs, the agricultural life, craftsmanship as well as the conviviality and the religious tolerance of an entire population, these photographs explore the secular culture of Mount Lebanon with passion and divulge unsuspected aspects of it.
The drafts of the rural life of yesterday exhibited in this work etc… etc…

Table of contents:
Foreword – Introduction – Manuscript from an Unknown Traveler – A Pillow Set between Earth and Sky – Dignified and Sturdy as an Oak – The Labor and the Days – Bunches from the Fields – With Patience, the Leaf of the Mulberry Tree Becomes Silk – Conviviality as Destiny and Art of Living – Provisions for Wintertime – Strong Beats of a Lifetime – An Example of a Clergy among Many Others – Professions and Craftsmen – On the Paths of Mount Lebanon – A Glance through Postcards – Bibliography – Index of the Postcards’ Editors – Transliteration